


summer move forward and leave your heat anchored in dust

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:02:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Geoffrey and Anna, and coming home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	summer move forward and leave your heat anchored in dust

The way the wind drops reminds her of Bolivia. The air compresses, turns into large tectonic masses, shifting past each other slowly, slowly. For a moment, she remembers the coming of the southern storms, the light livid, the world's edges done in darkened green and blue. In the street, below the window, everything is thickened and still, suspended in treacle.

So Anna is startled at the sudden noise, immediate and close as the air, and turns around quickly enough to catch the flash of movement in the shadows. Geoffrey is shaky on his feet, looking at the ground as he takes the jump off the last two steps, across the small room and the mess, into the tiny kitchen beyond. He rummages in drawers, the sound of rattling cutlery clear and vivid in her ears, and then he vanishes from view and she hears running water. At length he emerges, sits down on the couch and takes two pills with effortless rhythm, gulp and swallow, and then he rests his head in his hands. There's a book next to him, and he pushes it fretfully to the floor.

And it's only then he notices he's sitting on a couch strewn with blankets and tangled sheets, and looks up, startled. "Anna? You're..."

"Awake," she says, and comes to sit beside him. "So are you."

"Headache," he says briefly, voice husky. He has a summer cold, Anna remembers, and during the day it made him irritable, hoarsely sarcastic, and he scared the apprentices, but now he just looks young and soft-edged, hair tousled as though he's been tossing and turning through into these small hours. "I was keeping Ellen awake, I think. It's the storm."

It's still quiet outside, still eerie with streetlights under a clear sky, but without thinking he knows what she knows, and it makes her smile a little bit. Of course, of course Geoffrey is able to feel the tightening of the atmosphere, the waiting for the break. She couldn't, before. She suspects he always could.

But she only says, "Yeah, the storm," and he nods, inclining his head. For a moment she has a bizarre desire to run a brush through the tangles in his hair. But she doesn't move as he shifts, trying to get more comfortable. His bare feet trace a line along the edge of her sheets before dipping to the floor. So fragile, she thinks; so perfectly designed, skin and bones and translucent white flesh. How easy to break.

"I'm sitting on your bed," he says, wry and apologetic. "I'm sorry."

"I wasn't using it anyway." She smiles at him, mirroring his wryness. "I couldn't sleep either."

"Yeah," he says, briefly, oddly ineloquent. Idly he straightens the covers, smoothes the wrinkles with hands held flat. It's an oddly domestic gesture, and again, she wants to smile. She and Geoffrey have messed it up, but her little bed was pretty, neat, thoughtfully laid out with cushions and lots of generous, expansive pillows. Ellen is as ham-fisted speaking her own words as she is graceful speaking others', and she doesn't know what Geoffrey knows about how to be quiet, but Anna understands fluffy pillows and cups of tea, sweet unspoken details: these are Ellen's kindnesses.

"I'm going to be cranky tomorrow," Geoffrey says, still soft-edged and unguarded. "God help my Titania. Don't let me do anything I'll regret."

He's only half-serious; Anna knows who Geoffrey's Titania is, whom she'll always be.

"I'm not with you tomorrow, remember? I'll going apartment-hunting tomorrow." Anna has planned it out; she's looked at websites, she's put careful red rings around advertisements in the newspaper. Staying Geoffrey's response, she goes on, "You've been very sweet, Geoffrey. You and Ellen. But I can't live on your couch forever."

Geoffrey chuckles, the sound warm and low in the thick silence. "Anna, I assure you, you can. But if, as is perfectly understandable, you'd rather not share your living space indefinitely with an aging diva and a certified madman..." He trails off, hands held out in a gesture of supplication.

Sternly, quashing both the smile and the rising bubble of something else indefinable, she says: "Geoffrey, you shouldn't talk about yourself that way."

"What way?" His voice is hoarse again, and he draws his feet up onto the couch, hugging his knees.

"The 'certified madman' way," she tells him, still stern. "You're not ill any more."

"I wouldn't say that." He coughs, deliberately pathetic, and reaches for his glass of water. She laughs despite herself and puts a hand on his arm. He's more worn-down than really ill; he spent the day striding through whatever haze it is he has around his head, shaking off Anna's and Ellen's offers of camomile tea and aspirin with growled Shakespearean war-cries. Anna found it all charming: Ellen's frustration, Geoffrey's tenacity, their theatrical domesticity against the backdrop of the northern summer.

She sighs, deeply, and she feels the rattle in her bones. She's waiting for the breaking of the storm.

"Anna." Geoffrey is sitting up, and she can see he's too warm – he's breathing too quickly, and the cotton of his t-shirt is sticking to his skin – but he's looking right at her, eyes clear. "Tell me about Bolivia."

Slowly, Anna shakes her head. She's happy to talk about Montreal: about the city he loves and that she is learning to love, with its cobbled streets, its spreading trees, its seasons that sparkle as they shift. The city that has gone quiet tonight, slowly revolving through the heat and pressure of the air, the city where she came home.

She stands up carefully, stretching out. Her body is tired underneath the ticking of her mind, and her muscles ache pleasantly as she walks to the window. "Why do you want to know?" she asks quietly.

"Humour a madman." He's still wry, still gentle. He isn't laughing at her.

Standing behind the glass, she remembers the way the leaves dripped after the rain. The people sang to bring on the storms, and they sang through the rush of water, and they sang to herald the coming of the sun. Alvaro said he would be killed, and laughed. The men marched with flags for hundred of kilometres through the countryside and the cities, up into the mountains and into the clouds. And there was no drama, no audience: they danced for themselves, they sang for themselves, they marched for themselves and their future beneath their own sky. It was musical, it was clean and perfect.

"And then what happened?" Geoffrey asks, and he doesn't ask that she turn around. He hasn't moved, and she feels his gaze following hers through the window, through into the vacuum before the storm.

And then it was still beautiful, sometimes, and the people still had that sparkle, that intensity of colour in their eyes, but suddenly it was too sparkling and too intense and all too much all at once. Suddenly they were marching beneath flags forwards to the future and bullets and glass were blasting into the past, through barriers of present flesh and of bone. They only wanted freedom for themselves, a better way to live, and she could only think about-

"Anna, what?" He's so gentle, still, and although his movements are cat-like, quiet, she feels him get up and walk across to her, the warmth of his body mutedly vivid and close. "What could you think about?"

"You," she says. She turns around and takes in his expression, laughing a little at his mixture of confusion and care. "Not you, really," she goes on, and it's easier to say this time. "Not you. Hamlet."

She screws her eyes tight shut and says it, get it into the room like a throwing star: "What a piece of work is a man!"

"How noble in reason," he agrees, but the words are quiet, without expression. As though he's handling them delicately, leaving them clean and for her to use. "How infinite in faculty."

"How like a god," she bursts out. "That's it, isn't it? And it wasn't like that. The revolution was important. It was for the good of the people. But each person, each life – they should have been worth something, they should have meant something. It should have been... different."

In the end, she's just shrugging at him. It should have been different. But real life isn't like theatre, and Geoffrey understands that more than most people. He opens the window and flumps back down on the couch. She goes to sit beside him, sinking into the soft cushions with a slight smile. "The Canadian Consulate wanted to send me to Winkler," she says after a while. "I'm not sure how they knew I'm from there. I suppose it must be on my passport. Then they wanted to send me to New Burbage."

"But that would have been in contravention of the Geneva Conventions," says Geoffrey in perfectly expressionless fashion.

She nods. "Right. So I told them I was going to Montreal. And I did."

She arrived in late spring, and Geoffrey picked her up bodily off the doorstep and deposited her in an armchair with a pile of cushions. Ellen ran to make tea. It's a bittersweet memory, tinged with grief, but with also affection. That's what the bubble of something indefinable is, she thinks; simple affection for Geoffrey, whose mind is so dark and complex, and who finds it so easy to find people to love. It was the same in Bolivia, people rushing to meet her and to kiss her hands, the woman from the far north who had been so good to their comrades. There's sweetness in that memory, too.

Geoffrey smiles. "Yes, you did. And you're not going to leave, unless you want to see a grown man burst into tears in front of hundreds of people. Again."

She's not indispensable, she thinks, and says so. "You managed for months before I came."

He takes a deep breath and stands up again. For a second, he sways, and she reaches out to catch his elbow; he's probably getting sleepy again.

"Do you still have a headache?" she asks, concerned, and he leans into her, surprises her by twirling and laughing out loud.

"Those months without you, Anna?" he says, still grinning broadly. "They were a twilight existence, I tell you."

Letting go of her hand with due ceremony, he reaches for the floor and picks up a book lying forlorn and open under the couch. "I think," he says, with emphasis, "I may read myself to sleep."

She nods. It's something he used to do in the winter, too. Geoffrey doesn't sleep easily – he told her once, on one of the blurred nights when she was jet-lagged and he was startled awake by every tick of the clock, that he wasn't always like this, it's something to do with the twilight time in the asylum – and he reads, to himself, to an invisible audience, and she fell asleep in the mornings to the sound of his voice becoming part of the texture of the silence. Some nights, Shakespeare, flowing from his parted lips even with his eyes half-shut and the book long since dropped. Other nights, Marlowe and Barthes and Proust, and sometimes, in the perfect stillness of the early morning, old French fairy-tales from memory, Snow White and her fur slippers.

Tonight, he holds up the book he knocked to the floor– and that's strange, she thinks in retrospect, because Geoffrey usually takes care of books – shows it to be battered and well-thumbed, and says, clearly, "Successful Arts Administration. By Richard Smith-Jones."

She looks from it, to Geoffrey, to it again. "Oh, dear," she says after a while. "Geoffrey, why do you even..."

He looks solemnly at her. "Because, hopefully, he's written something horrifically libellous about me and then, with your help, I can sue him, and we can use the money to fix the holes in the theatre roof." He grins, absurdly pleased with himself.

"Are you allowed to testify in court?" She's feeling wicked. "You are a certified madman, after all..."

"Touché." He leans back and begins to read, aloud, randomly from the middle. "_Which is, of course, an approach that eliminates the non-essential in the artistic sphere of arts administration. The key to effective marketing of a sub-conventional_ – is that a word? I don't think 'sub-conventional' is a word."

He's faltering. "Geoffrey, you're not well," she says, clipped and stern, and he sits down beside her and becomes, all at once, part of the dimness in the room. Shadows fall into his eyes, his face pale and ghostly until he's insubstantial, becoming like nothing, and it's only the warmth of him that makes her absolutely sure he's still there.

"Geoffrey," she says, quickly, hesitant, but he's quiet, concentrating.

"Listen."

She knows what it means. In the distance through the open window, the thunderclouds are boiling into stacks on the horizon, putting a lid on the baked atmosphere. She closes her eyes and waits. The room is getting darker, getting dark.

The lightning comes first. Growing up, she learned to count between the flashes and the rolls of thunder, calculating time and distance, but there's no scope for dramatic pause – they're sitting in the heart of the storm. It rolls around her head and soothes her, even in its ferocity, with every cold droplet that flies in, every noise of breaking as twigs and leaves snap and crack through the open space into the room.

It takes time for it to blow itself out. She hugs a cushion and sits back, feels free and comfortable in the clear cold air. Through closed eyelids, she can make out the difference between light and dark.

When the silence comes, cleansed and charged with sweetness, she opens her eyes and looks out at the clean, dark blue sky. Moving quietly, she gets up to close the window. and doesn't disturb Geoffrey, asleep and dreaming in the calm beyond the storm. She touches his head and he stirs and shivers, murmurs something about Prospero's magic, and she smiles, notices how pale he is, and throws a blanket over him.

Settling back into her cushions, washed clean by early light, she spends a moment just watching him breathe, and picks up his book. She reads about marketing strategy and corporate bonanzas, and around her the torn leaves flutter in the breeze, wet from the clouds, as the night turns into dawn.


End file.
